Sweet smell of success: Oscar de la Renta

Oscar de la Renta's advertising campaign for his new fragrance, Live in Love.Photo by
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Hundreds of new perfumes are launched every year, and the competition for editorial attention is stiff. As a result, each launch tries to best competitors with larger-than-life thematic events; for a launch by a brand known for its parties, beauty editors were flown to Europe then put on a train to a remote warehouse, where they fumbled around under disco lights to throbbing house music all night long. The perfume might be a scrubber that stinks to high heaven, but a funky bottle and a splashy launch party do make for a good story.

The designer Oscar de la Renta has been in the perfume business long enough to know that when the story is the perfume itself, less is more. In early November, de la Renta came to The Bay flagship in Toronto to launch Live in Love, his latest perfume, with an appearance to personally meet and talk with fans. Beforehand, I sat down with the 79-year-old designer; his stepdaughter Eliza Bolen Reed, the family company's vice-president of licensing; and her husband Alexander Bolen, who is the CEO. The name, de la Renta says, is an exhortation to carpe diem. "I have the memory of a mosquito and what I live for is today," he says.

De la Renta once again turned to his landscape for scent inspiration; the original Oscar, a bestseller since its 1977 launch, was inspired by his mother's flower garden and the light floral Live in Love takes its cue from the mingling flower scents on his verdant estates in Connecticut and the Dominican Republic.

"A garden is about first and foremost learning patience. Learning about life," the avid gardener explains. "When you plant a twig you will probably never see that tree grow into its majestic beauty as a tree but you unconsciously are doing it for future generations. In a way it's a continuation of, a projection of, yourself."

He is waxing philosophical, but also referring to himself (he has lived and gardened at the same property for 40 years and after a brush with cancer earlier in the year, is once again healthy and jovial).

"There are a lot of things that I have planted in Connecticut that probably, I will never see in their full glory. But other people will."

"I believe in reincarnation but I don't believe that I will reincarnate as myself," he adds. "You reincarnate as your legacy, as what you left behind, the evidence of your passage through this world. That's what people remember you for."

The most memorable - and visible - difference in this perfume launch is it eschews the typical airbrushed wellknown, well-paid celebrity ad campaign. It eschews photography entirely - a nod to de la Renta's own beginnings in the industry as a fashion illustrator. "As you know almost every fragrance today is identified with a movie actress or a famous model," he says, recounting how as an experiment, they removed the bottle and brand names from dozens of current print perfume ads, "and tried to identify which fragrance the actress was advertising." They couldn't tell. "Not only do they change every year but at the end it has no strong identity as to the fragrance itself," de la Renta says, triumphantly. "When I create and sell a fragrance, I'm not trying to say that [the women who buy it] should look like Jennifer Lopez. I think that a woman should have an identity of her own!"

British illustrator David Downtown was commissioned to create the ad campaign image, a striking, elegant brushstroke illustration that looks torn from a page of a 1950s Harper's Bazaar or Kenneth Paul Bloch's Womens Wear Daily illustrations of the 1960s. "We loved it because it looks different, and it doesn't address a specific woman. A woman can project herself into it."

Not all aspects of the launch are so old-fashioned, however. Thanks to the brand's popular official Twitter @OscarPRgirl, a real-life Oscar PR employee who boasts more than 91,000 followers, the company gave away over 25,000 fragrance samples in just three days during Live in Love's launch promotion on Facebook. Getting the perfume itself out there for people to try is crucial.

"Women today are far more sophisticated at understanding the value of a fragrance. The fact is," de la Renta continues, "that a true fragrance is not ever really about the bottle or the packaging or the name, although that obviously evokes something." (For Live in Love, the emerald green box and bottle cap detail come as much from his garden topiaries as from the traditional medieval Christian colour symbolism of hope - the freshness of green motif pops up everywhere from The Divine Comedy to The Great Gatsby.) "But at the end, it's about yourself," de la Renta continues. "It's about when you are identified with a fragrance you are no longer wearing it because you like the name, it's because it's you."

As you might predict from his elegant, classic fashion aesthetic, de la Renta is a fan of Dancing with the Stars - it harkens back to an era when a man had to be able to dance well to impress a woman. We joke that he would be an excellent contestant and the designer perks up. "Here's the big problem with that for me," Bolen interjects. "Not only would he be good but he would love it and he would totally dump us! He would never show up to the office and just go to the studio and dance. So I don't want to encourage him."

"I don't think I am as agile as I once was," de la Renta admits, but adds with a coy twinkle, "but I think my best dance would probably be some kind of a Latin dance."

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